Ben Jonson,
Catholic Poet
ROBERT S.
MIOLA
Résumé : Cet article considère les éléments biographiques portant sur le
Catholicisme déclaré de Jonson et propose que cette religion encadrait et
infléchissait sa poésie. Maintenu à travers ses années de production littéraire
les plus importantes, le Catholicisme de Jonson met son art sous une lumière
révélatrice. Sa poésie reflète des sympathies et des croyances catholiques autant
en panégyrique qu’en satire. Elle met l’accent de façon surprenante sur les
bonnes actions et la sainteté de la vierge Marie. Elle représente le monde hostile
dans lequel vivaient les Catholiques anglais, assujettis à la trahison et à la
persécution. Le Catholicisme offrait à Jonson un cercle d’amis, des traditions
d’érudition et de cérémonie, une esthétique de la beauté et de l’image et une
gamme de croyances et pratiques dévotionnelles.
“Imprisoned, and almost at the gallows” for the murder of Gabriel Spencer
in a duel, Ben Jonson, astonishingly, converted to the forbidden religion,
Roman Catholicism: “Then took he his religion by trust of a priest who
visited him in prison. Thereafter he was twelve years a papist” (Conversations, 203–5).1 The priest may have been Thomas Wright, a loyalist, antiSpanish Jesuit imprisoned at this time,2 and Jonson may have explained his
reasons for converting and reconverting back later in Motives (1622), a work
that unfortunately has disappeared. But one thing is certain: the conversion
to Catholicism was inexpedient, even reckless, from a worldly, political
point of view. After all, one of Jonson’s interrogators in a 1597 bout with
the law over The Isle of Dogs had been Richard Topcliffe, the savage
priest-hunter who regularly tortured his victims. And the church/government
of early modern England eyed Catholics suspiciously, compelled them to
attend state services, spied upon them, interrogated, charged, and punished
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them, and, on occasion, executed them for treason. Jonson’s Sejanus (1603,
pub. 1605), it seems, landed him in exactly this kind of trouble with the
authorities: one of Jonson’s enemies, Northampton, summoned him before
the Privy Council for writing Sejanus and accused him “both of popery and
treason” (Conversations, p. 273). Since Drummond’s notice is tantalizingly
brief and since the earliest surviving copy of the play, the 1605 quarto,
embodies substantial revision, the charge remains mysterious. The Revels
editor, Philip J. Ayres, reasonably conjectures that the original treason trial
in Sejanus mirrored the sensational trial of Ralegh just months before, thus
angering Northampton, one of Ralegh’s chief persecutors. Jonson’s perceived
sympathy for Ralegh could be construed as treasonous and popish because the
brief against Ralegh included conspiracy to depose the king and “to alter
religion, to bring in the Roman superstition.”3 Whether Jonson’s Silius
reflects Ralegh or not, that character, when accused of treason, certainly
echoes the protests of Catholics about “the execution of justice in England,”
to use the infamous phrase of William Cecil, Lord Burlegh:4
Alas, I scent not your confederacies?
Your plots, and combinations? I not know
Minion Sejanus hates me; and that all
This boast of law, and law, is but a form,
A net of Vulcan’s filing, a mere engine,
To take that life by a pretext of justice
Which you pursue in malice? (3.241–47)
Jonson’s professed Catholicism involved him subsequently with state
authorities. Two days after the discovery of the Gunpowder plot on 5
November 1605, he received a warrant from the Privy Council to convey a
promise of safe passage to an unnamed priest. Failing to find the man, Jonson
began his letter to Salisbury the next day, 8 November, by protesting both
his labor and sincerity “in the discharge of this business, to the satisfaction
of Your Lordship and the state.” He closes the letter offering to “make further
trial” and again asserting his integrity and loyalty (HS 1: 202).5 The details
remain unclear but the incident reveals Jonson nervously operating in the
uncomfortable middle-zone between the government and its enemies. On 10
January 1606 the Consistory Court cited Jonson and his wife Anne for
absenting themselves from communion “as far as we can learn ever since
the king came in” (1603); “he is a poet,” the citation continues, and “by fame
a seducer of youth to the popish religion” (HS 1: 220). Four similar citations
followed that year. Jonson paid recusancy fines but repeatedly denied the
charge of persuading young people to Catholicism. Moreover, he refused to
take communion, according to the citation for April 26, “until he shall be
Robert S. Miola / Ben Jonson, Catholic Poet / 103
resolved either by the minister of the parish or some other in the scruple he
maketh therein” (HS 1: 221). The court assigned him such “learned men” as
he requested, including the Dean of Paul’s and the Chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less. Jonson had to confer with some of these tutors
twice a week and report to the Court on the last day of the following term.
Jonson later recalled his reconversion to Protestantism (1610) and, “in token
of true reconciliation,” his draining of the communion cup (Conversations,
pp. 261–63). Both the late date of the reconversion and the mockery implicit
in the gesture suggest that the poet proved a most refractory pupil to the good
doctors. Even after this time Jonson attended a Paris debate about the nature
of the Eucharist, in 1612.6 Jonson could speak of his religious allegiance
cavalierly, claiming that he was “versed in both” faiths (Conversations, p.
613); and he was certainly capable of using anti-Catholic discourse in his
poetry and plays.7 But Jonson paid penalties for his Catholicism and took
considerable risks to maintain it. His final reconversion elicited harsh
judgment from at least one eulogist, Thomas Willford: “The last act did
disgrace the first; / His part he played exceeding well, / A Catholic, until he
fell / To sects and schisms” (HS 11: 493).
Jonson’s Catholicism conditioned and inflected his “wit’s great overplus,” the phrase of friend and fellow poet Robert Herrick, as criticism is
beginning to recognize. T. Wilson Hayes (1991) situates Jonson among a
group of dissident Catholic intellectuals. A. W. Johnson (1994) notes the
possible influence of Thomas Wright and the operation of a Catholic
aesthetic in the structuring of the poetry. Taking the conversion to Catholicism seriously, James P. Crowley (1996) discerns a coherent religious ethic
throughout Jonson’s poetry. Observing that Jonson’s years as a professed
Catholic, 1598 to 1610, coincide with the period of his greatest literary
production, Ian Donaldson (1997) discusses Jonson’s Catholicism as necessitating a kind of duplicity throughout his career. Reviewing the evidence
of Jonson’s Catholic faith and the critical neglect, Richard Harp (1999),
co-editor of the Ben Jonson Journal, calls for a full study of Jonson and
religion.8 Such reevaluation must recognize at the outset that Jonson, like
many English Catholics, lived and died loyal to crown and country. There
is no reason to read dissimulation in the poems celebrating the king’s
preservation from treason and praising Lord Monteagle for uncovering the
Gunpowder plot (Epigrams, 35, 51, 60), or, for that matter, in the masques.9
Such reevaluation must also acknowledge that both Catholicism and antiCatholicism evolved during the long period of Jonson’s life, taking many
shapes and offering varying capacities for compromise and co-existence.10
These things being granted, Jonson’s Catholicism offers an illuminating
angle of vision into his art, especially his poetry, early and late. The verse
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reflects Catholic sympathies and beliefs, as it runs, characteristically, to
panegyric and satire. The poetry occasionally has doctrinal implications,
exhibiting a surprising emphasis on good works and a recurrent devotion to
the Virgin Mary. Moreover, Jonson’s poetry depicts the hostile world in
which the early modern Catholic lived, prey to spies and betrayal, reliant on
conscience and a community of the faithful.
Most immediately, Jonson’s poetry of praise attests to his relations,
literary and personal, with fellow Catholics in early modern England. Jonson
wrote a prefatory poem to The Sprite of Trees and Herbs (1598–99), an
unpublished botanical emblem-book by Thomas Palmer, the Oxford don
deprived of his post because of his Catholicism and persecuted in retirement.
In the poem Jonson admires all the plants that thrive “in spite of storms and
thunder” (l. 7). Jonson supplied an allegorical ode to preface Pancharis
(1603) by Hugh Holland,11 a poet who, like Jonson, studied at Westminster
School and converted to Catholicism. Holland returned the favor soon after,
supplying two prefatory poems to Sejanus, one of which asserts the author’s
innocence of all crimes represented in the play. At about this time Jonson
also contributed a prefatory poem to Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the
Mind.12 A Jesuit who taught in several colleges on the Continent, Wright
had also written A Treatise Showing the Possibility and Conveniency of the
Real Presence of our Saviour in the Blessed Sacrament (1596), which may
have contributed to Jonson’s scruples about communion.13 Jonson also
wrote commendatory verses on the poems of his “honoured friend,” John
Beaumont, a Catholic born at Grace-dieu, the former priory, brother of the
more famous Francis Beaumont. John Beaumont’s collection of sacred and
secular poems, Bosworth Field (1629), Jonson says, resists attack and
“makes his muse a saint” (l. 22).
In addition to these prefatory poems, Jonson wrote more pointed panegyrics. He thanks in verse his Catholic host and patron Esmé Stuart, Lord
Aubigny, dedicatee of Sejanus, who “lent timely succours, and new life
begot” (Epigrams, 127, 8). Several poems cautiously praise Catholics associated with active resistance to the national religious settlement. The “Ode
to James, Earl of Desmond” (Underwood, 25) lauds the son of “the rebel
earl,” Gerald Fitzgerald, an Irish Catholic who led Irish and papal armies
against English Protestants. Jonson’s poem celebrates the virtue of James
Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond, who suffered imprisonment in the Tower of
London from 1579 to 1601; the poem exhorts Fitzgerald not to think himself
“unfortunate / If subject to the jealous errors / Of politic pretext” (ll. 27–29)
and exclaims, “O glad innocence, / Where only a man’s birth is his offence”
(ll. 31–32). The poet hopes for new light upon those places “Where darkness
with her gloomy-sceptred hand / Doth now command” (ll. 61–62). Here
Robert S. Miola / Ben Jonson, Catholic Poet / 105
praise of Desmond accompanies criticism of “politic pretext” and the regnant forces of “darkness” that persecute Catholics. Conservative as ever,
Jonson advocates “patience” (l. 47), not fury, finally urging the Earl to stand
“As far from all revolt, as you are now from fortune” (l. 65). Jonson also
celebrated the virtue of Sir Ralph Sheldon (Epigrams, 119), a wealthy
recusant possibly implicated in a plot against Elizabeth (1594) and later
knighted (1607). His poem first rejects those who are good from necessity
or discomfort, those who fly the court for want of clothes, or quit gambling
because of losses; Sheldon, by contrast, acts “out of judgement, not disease”
(l. 8); he lives “to conscience, not to show” (l. 14). The appeal to conscience
echoes the standard Catholic defense for the practice of a prohibited religion.
Once again, Jonson sounds notes of caution in his admiration: Sheldon “with
safe skill” (l. 9) acts prudently, looking for the best but sometimes choosing
“the least ill” (l. 10), “treading a better path, not contrary” (l. 12). Jonson
also wrote an epigram (Underwood, 78) to his muse, Lady Digby, and her
husband Sir Kenelm Digby, Catholic adventurer, philosopher, scientist,
diplomat, and Jonson’s literary executor. The poet praises this son of a
convicted (and executed) conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot: “He’s prudent,
valiant, just, and temperate; / In him all virtue is beheld in state” (ll. 5–6).
And, finally, not in verse but in Conversations with Drummond (pp. 145–46),
Jonson recorded his admiration for the poet Robert Southwell, a Jesuit
executed for treason at Tyburn: “That Southwell was hanged; yet so he had
written that piece of his ‘The burning babe,’ he would have been content to
destroy many of his.” Jonson shows awareness of the tragic fate of his fellow
Catholic and admiration for the poem that best exemplifies the Catholic
Baroque — profuse in symbolic imagery, abundant in theatrical emotion,
and rich in intellectual energy.
The implied criticism of the reformist regime that sounds lightly in the
praise poems recurs more forcefully in “Panegyre” (1603), Jonson’s celebration of James’s entrance to his first session of Parliament. This poem,
influenced, ironically enough, by Thomas More’s panegyric celebrating
Henry VIII,14 features Themis, the mythological mother of peace, order, and
justice, who orients the new king to his land, showing him the good and,
more to the point, the evil:
Where laws were made to serve the tyrant will;
Where sleeping they could save, and waking kill;
Where acts gave licence to impetuous lust
To bury churches in forgotten dust,
And with their ruins raise the pandar’s bowers. (ll. 99–103)
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The lines pay tribute to their ghostly progenitor, Thomas More, by expressing a Catholic view of the English reformation, which began with King
Henry VIII’s “tyrant will,” his lust for Anne Boleyn and for power, and
proceeded through enforced conformity on pain of death (the notorious
executions of Fisher and More). The ensuing legislation resulted in the
stripping of the altars, as Eamon Duffy famously put it,15 and the confiscation of church properties. Catholics saw the Reformation as a pretext for
unbridled greed and outright robbery (“impetuous lust”). By Jonson’s day,
abandoned churches dotted the landscape, “bare ruined choirs where late the
sweet birds sang” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 73). The churches buried in forgotten dust, Catholics argued, supplied every kind of greed and base self-gratification, the “pandar’s bowers.”
More than mere nostalgia, this Catholic view of the Protestant Reformation at times fuels Jonson’s satire. Puritans are natural targets, as witness
Epigrams, 75:
I cannot think there’s that antipathy
‘Twixt Puritans and players as some cry;
Though Lippe, at Paul’s, ran from his text away
To inveigh ‘gainst plays, what did he then but play?
Railing against plays from the pulpit of Saint Paul’s church, Lippe himself
merely acts out a performance, plays a prescribed role; he is a hypocrite, a
moral fraud and, in the original Greek sense, an “actor.” As Jonson wrote in
Discoveries (p. 61), Puritanus hypocrita est haereticus, “A Puritan is a
heretical hypocrite.” The Church of England, of course, regularly battled
Puritans in this period as well, but the haereticus pointedly recapitulates the
familiar charge of Catholics against Puritan reformers. Lippe gets his comeuppance at the end of Bartholomew Fair, when the Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land
Busy loses the debate on playing to the Puppet Dionysius. A hypocrite who
gorges himself on roast pig then condemns the carnality of the fair, Busy
expresses himself in language explicitly coded as anti-Catholic: he berates
the ginger-bread woman, “Hence with thy basket of popery, thy nest of
images” (3.6.72–73). He attacks “the merchandise of Babylon,” “the peeping of popery upon the stalls,” “the profane pipes, the tinkling timbrels,” the
“shop of relics,” “this idolatrous grove of images,” “this flasket of idols”
(3.6.91–96). He reviles “those superstitious relics, those lists of Latin, the
very rags of Rome, and patches of popery” (4.6.105–6). Jonson depicts
Busy’s brethren in The Alchemist, the sanctimonious Tribulation and Ananias, who mouth pieties but seek profits. They collect the sureties on loans
one day overdue, excusing their practices by attributing their newfound
wealth to Providence and predestination (3.2.72–73). Again, Jonson’s Puri-
Robert S. Miola / Ben Jonson, Catholic Poet / 107
tans deploy the conventional rhetoric of anti-Catholic slander: Tribulation
contrasts his “beauteous discipline” with “the menstruous cloth and rag of
Rome” (3.2.32–33), i.e., the Whore of Babylon. In a fit of zeal Ananias
exclaims, “I hate traditions; I do not trust them. . . . They are Popish, all!”
(3.2.106–7).16
Jonson continues his satire on the “godly” in Epigrams, 92, “The New
Cry,” where they have prevailed upon the new breed of statesman in London,
shallow, pretentious, and ignorant. Like their Puritan mentors, such statesmen engage in a fashionable anti-Catholicism:
And of the Powder Plot they will talk yet.
At naming the French king, their heads they shake,
And at the Pope and Spain slight faces make. (ll. 32–34)
The new statesmen still talk of the Gunpowder Plot, which set off a wave of
anti-Catholic legislation, including the Oath of Allegiance (1606). They
shake their heads at King Henri IV (1589–1610), who famously converted
to Catholicism (1593) and issued the Edict of Nantes (1598), which made
Catholicism the official religion of France. They make faces at Pope Paul V
(1605–21), who urged toleration of loyal Catholic subjects and condemned
James’s Oath of Allegiance in two Briefs (1606, 1607), and at Spain, the
traditional Catholic enemy. The new statesmen condemn those, the poem
concludes, “That know not so much state, wrong, as they do” (l. 40). In The
Staple of News Jonson again satirizes trendy anti-Catholic bigotry. In Act 3,
Scene 2, Thomas tries to sell a “she Anabaptist” (151) news of the Turkish
Sultan turning Christian; “and to clear / The controversy ‘twixt the Pope and
him, / Which is the Antichrist,” the report continues, the Sultan plans to visit
the Puritan Church at Amsterdam and “quit all marks o’the beast” (142–46).
The clever pamphleteer exploits Puritan hatred of Catholicism and fear of
the other infidel, the Turk, to create an apocalyptic, self-congratulatory (and
profitable) bulletin. Also looking for cheap thrills but of a different sort, a
second customer asks, “Any miracles / Done in Japan by the Jesuits, or in
China?” (153–54). Anti-Catholic discourses, the poem and the play suggest,
feed on an insatiable appetite for sensational story and self-aggrandizement.
Providing a complex of sympathies, antipathies, and beliefs that inflect
the poems, Jonson’s Catholicism also on occasion contributes doctrine. The
poet took an active interest in Catholic theology throughout his life. In
addition to his attendance at the 1612 Eucharist debates noted above, Jonson
acquired books of Catholic theology and polemics. McPherson’s Catalogue
for his library lists a copy of the Vulgate, Biblia sacra (Antwerp, 1599);
works by Gregory of Nyssa and Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrus; attacks on
Calvin by Jerome Bolsec, De Ioannis Calvini (Cologne, 1580) and Colum-
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banus Vrancx, Malleus Calvinistarum (Antwerp, 1590); Thomas Stapleton’s
Tres Thomae (Douai, 1588), an account of the apostle, Beckett, and More;
Stanislaus Cristanovic’s Examen catholicum edicti Anglicani (Paris, 1607),
a protest against the anti-Catholic legislation of the 1606 Parliament; John
Sweet’s Monsigr. fate voi. Or, A discovery of the Dalmatian Apostata
(Saint-Omer, 1617), interestingly, a condemnation of the apostasy of
Marc’Antonio De Dominis, Archbishop of Dalmatia, who joined the English
Church and became Dean of Windsor in 1617; John Barnes’s Dissertatio
contra aequivocationes (Paris, 1625), a treatise against equivocation written
from the viewpoint of a loyalist Catholic; and Girolamo Savonarola’s
Triumphus crucis (Leyden, 1633), a defense of the faith by the reformer.
Compiling a revised catalogue for the forthcoming Cambridge edition of
Jonson, H. R. Woudhuysen adds six titles to this list: a copy of the Louvain
edition of More’s Latin works (1566); Jacobus Simancas’ handbook against
heresies, Enchiridion (Antwerp, 1573); the works of Tertullian (Opera
Omnia, Antwerp, 1598), Saint Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, Douai,
1614), and Saint Gregory (Opera Omnia, Paris, 1615); a Roman Catholic
book of ritual, Processionale (Antwerp, 1620).17 There must have been
others: in “An Execration upon Vulcan,” written about the fire that destroyed
his library in November 1623, Jonson laments the loss of “three books not
afraid / To speak the fate of the Sicilian maid / To our own ladies,” (ll.
95–97), i.e., his partial translation of John Barclay’s Argenis (1621), commissioned by James himself in 1622. Barclay was a Catholic whose remarkably popular and influential romance, Argenis, satirized Jesuits and Puritans,
as well as the reformist doctrine of predestination. Jonson continues the
inventory:
And twice twelve years’ stored-up humanity,
With humble gleanings in divinity,
After the fathers, and those wiser guides
Whom faction had not drawn to study sides. (ll. 101–4)
He mourns here his theology collection, begun about the time of his 1598
conversion, specifically the works of the church fathers, the architects of
Catholic dogma, and the “wiser” guides, those who wrote freely and unpolemically before the Reformation. In Epigrams, 80 Jonson’s interest in
Catholic theology takes the form of doctrinal assertion:
“Of Life and Death”
The ports of death are sins; of life, good deeds
Through which our merit leads us to our meeds.
How wilful blind is he, then, that would stray,
And hath it in his powers to make his way!
Robert S. Miola / Ben Jonson, Catholic Poet / 109
This world death’s region is, the other life’s;
And here it should be one of our first strifes
So to front death, as men might judge us past it:
For good men but see death, the wicked taste it. (ll. 1–8)
Again glancing critically at the reformist belief in predestination, Jonson here
affirms the autonomy of free will: humans choose between the gates of death
and life, between sins and good deeds. So saying, the poet endorses the Catholic
doctrine of good works, “through which our merit leads us to our meeds” (l. 2).
Luther, Calvin, and those who came after, of course, emphatically rejected this
doctrine, arguing that one could be saved by faith alone, ex sola fide, not by
any action or merit of his or her own choosing and doing. Catholic theology
here supplies this brief exhortation to holy living and holy dying.
Jonson’s poetry more pervasively draws upon Catholic doctrine concerning the Virgin Mary and traditional reverence for her as an icon of human
perfection and holiness. Reformers repeatedly condemned Marian doctrine
and devotion as the prime examples of papist idolatry. The controversy sheds
light on Jonson’s oft-quoted criticism of Donne’s Anniversary: “profane and
full of blasphemies . . . he told Mr. Donne, if it had been written of the Virgin
Mary it had been something” (Conversations, pp. 32–34). Usually remembered for Donne’s response, “he described the idea of a woman, and not as
she was” (pp. 34–35), the criticism reveals more about Jonson, particularly
his reverence for Mary, peerless among mortal women. To attribute to
anyone else praise belonging to her constitutes blasphemy for Jonson. This
devotion to Mary empowers one of Jonson’s most moving poems, the elegy
“On My First Daughter”: “Here lies, to each her parents’ ruth, / Mary, the
daughter of their youth” (ll. 1–2). After six months the baby died,
Whose soul heaven’s Queen (whose name she bears),
In comfort of her mother’s tears,
Hath placed amongst her virgin train. (ll. 7–9)
Jonson deploys specifically the Catholic conceptions of Mary as Queen of
Heaven and as the merciful mother who responds to the cries of suffering
humanity. These ideas appear encapsulated, for example, in the first lines of
the immensely popular medieval hymn, Salve, Regina, “All Hail, O Queen”:
Salve, regina, mater misericordiae. Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve. Ad te
clamamus, exules filii Evae. Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes in hac lacrymarum
valle. Eia ergo advocata nostra illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte.
All hail, O Queen, mother of mercy, life, sweetness, and our hope, all hail. We exiled
the sons of Eve do cry unto thee. To thee we sigh, groaning and weeping in this vale of
tears. Therefore, O thou our advocate, turn those thy merciful eyes unto us.18
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Rejecting such devotion, Luther said that Mary was not his consolation or
his life; he specifically discouraged the use of honorific epithets like “Queen
of Heaven.” In 1538 John Hollybush published a refutation of the hymn,
condemning it for blasphemy, and providing an alternate version, which
substituted Christ for Mary.19 But Marian devotion, including even the
popular iconography of Mary crowned in heaven, attended by a train of
virgin souls, here supplies Jonson’s personal lament.
The Virgin Mary, and the propriety of earthly comparison to her, furnish
a late poem to the Catholic Henrietta Maria, Underwood, 66, “An Epigram
to the Queen, then Lying in, 1630”:
Hail Mary, full of grace! it once was said
And by an angel, to the blessed’st maid,
The mother of our Lord: why may not I
Without profaneness, yet, a poet, cry
Hail Mary, full of honours! to my queen,
The mother of our prince? (ll. 1–6)
The poet may licitly invoke Mary for praise of an earthly woman so long as
he observes necessary proprieties and distinctions. Queen Mary, full of
“honours,” not “grace,” gives birth to a prince who brings safety to the
“realm,” not to “mankind” (ll. 5, 1, 14, 8). “Let it be lawful so / To compare
small with great, as still we owe / Glory to God” (ll. 11–13). Jonson’s
devotion to Mary culminates in “The Garland of the Blessed Virgin Mary,”
prefacing Anthony Stafford’s The Female Glory (1635). The “garland” is
the poem itself, which glosses an emblematic picture of Mary or a pendant
on the Bridgettine rosary.20 The poem matches the letters of “Marie” with
symbolic flora — myrtle, almonds, rose, ivy, eglantine:
Thus love and hope and burning charity
(Divinest graces) are so intermixed
With odorous sweets and soft humility,
As if they adored the head whereon they’re fixed. (ll. 25–28)
The praise continues in the comments on the “reverse” of the emblem,
echoing, as Bernard H. Newdigate noted, the Hours of the Virgin and the
Litany of Loreto, this latter a poetic series of epithets formally approved as
a Catholic devotion by Sixtus V in 1587.21 Jonson’s appropriations from the
Litany attribute to Mary the very reverence and power that reformers
objected to as idolatrous:
Sweet tree of life, King David’s strength and tower,
The house of gold, the gate of heaven’s power,
The morning star, whose light our fall hath stayed. (ll. 38–40)
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Among other echoing phrases, Jonson here freely translates Turris Davidica,
“Tower of David,” Domus aurea “Golden House,” Ianua caeli, “Gate of
Heaven,” Stella matutina, “Morning Star.” Elsewhere he adapts Sancta
virgo virginum, “Holy virgin of virgins” and Mater castissima, “Most chaste
mother,” into “Most holy and pure virgin” (l. 37); Causa nostra laetitiae
appears straightforwardly as “cause of all our joy” (l. 42), as do Sedes
sapientiae, Mater amabilis, and Mater admirabilis: “The seat of sapience,
the most lovely mother / And most to be admirèd of thy sex” (ll. 45–46).
Jonson’s praise of Mary as “daughter, mother, spouse of God!” (ll. 33, 56)
exhibits both the devotion to the Virgin and the love of paradox that marks
the work of early modern Catholic poets like Robert Southwell, Henry
Constable, and Richard Crashaw.
Finally, Jonson’s poetry affords glimpses of the hostile world in which
English Catholics lived, subject to the constant danger of denunciation.
Jonson’s adaptation of Martial (5.78, 10.48, 11.52), “Inviting a Friend to
Supper” (Epigrams, 101), wittily replaces prospective Roman delights with
an English menu and native entertainments; the wine he offers will make
tobacco (considered a drink), nectar, and the Thespian spring “all but
Luther’s beer” (l. 34) by comparison. Jonson’s association of weaker,
continental beer with Martin Luther gibes at the arch-reformer and his
doctrine, a diluted, inferior form of Catholicism. Jonson’s “Nor shall our
cups make any guilty men” (l. 37) echoes Martial’s nec faciunt quemquam
pocula nostra reum (10.48.24), “my cups do not make anyone a defendant”;
but the line preceding again makes reference to the contemporary political
situation, “And we will have no Poley or Parrot by” (l. 36). Robert Poley
was a government spy who betrayed the Catholic Babington in 1586,
witnessed the murder of Marlowe at Deptford after supper, and remained
active in the late 1590s. In 1598 Parrot, another informer, gave evidence
against a Benedictine monk, Mark Barkworth.22 The references to antiCatholic spies give the conventional ending personal relevance and dark
immediacy. Jonson himself encountered spies during one of his imprisonments, “two damned villains to catch advantage of him” (Conversations, p.
212); these became the subject of Epigrams, 59, “On Spies”: “Spies, you are
lights in state, but of base stuff, / Who, when you’ve burnt yourselves down
to the snuff, / Stink and are thrown away. End fair enough” (ll. 1–3). Though
Jonson does not specify a reason for the use of informants against him, his
poetry certainly reflects the animosity of early modern English Catholics
toward spies. For such Catholics gatherings at supper, when vigilance might
be relaxed, or at Eucharist were extremely dangerous. At a dinner party in
1583, for example, John Hardy disagreed with the preacher Peter German
about the construction of a Latin passage in Eusebius. Since the passage, in
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Hardy’s view, suggested the autonomy of the bishops vis-à-vis the emperor,
German reported Hardy to the authorities, who imprisoned and interrogated
him.23 That Jonson dined with Catesby and the other conspirators several
weeks before the Gunpowder plot probably aroused the suspicion of government agents.
Jonson’s “Epistle to Katherine, Lady Aubigny,” written to the wife of
his Catholic patron and host,24 further depicts the plight of the Catholic in a
menacing Protestant world: “What if alone, / Without companions? ‘Tis safe
to have none. / In single paths dangers with ease are watched; / Contagion
in the press is soonest catched” (ll. 55–58). The isolation of the Catholic
household is one guarantor of its safety; traffic with the crowd brings peril
and plague, spiritual contagion. The “turning world” (l. 63), “giddy with
change,” “cannot see / Right the right way” (ll. 67–68), the poet continues;
therefore, “must your comfort be / Your conscience” (ll. 68–69). Here again
the individual conscience must stand against the dictates of the world, i.e.,
the state that mandates religious belief and persecutes non-conformity. As
before, Jonson goes on to celebrate the lady’s impending childbirth with an
allusion to Mary, specifically, an echo of the Ave Maria: “you worthy are
the glad increase / Of your blessed womb, made fruitful from above” (ll.
94–95). The compliment is justified by the larger context of the epideixis,
which concludes in praise for a mind that remains, and will remain, constant
and unchanged.
Ben Jonson’s Catholicism appears to have been a serious, well-considered choice, not a youthful indiscretion or an empty gesture. Versed in both
confessions, Jonson, to be sure, occasionally echoed reformist doctrines in
his poetry: the “Elegy” on Venetia Digby (Underwood, 84), for example,
envisions her in heaven, “By sure election, and predestined grace” (l. 198).
And certainly the complex balances between the faiths continually shifted
in the man as in the culture, responding to the pressures of internal change
and external event. But the influence of Catholicism on Jonson’s poetry runs
deep, persisting long after reconversion to the state religion in 1610. Catholicism offered Jonson a circle of friends and acquaintances, time-honored
authority, long traditions of learning and ceremony, a coherent aesthetic of
beauty and image, a range of beliefs and evocative devotional practices.
Even if every one of those gifts proved, at times, problematic, flawed, or
unwanted, they were substantial and well received.
Robert S. Miola / Ben Jonson, Catholic Poet / 113
Notes
1. For references to Jonson’s poetry, Discoveries, and Conversations with Drummond
(hereafter Conversations), I cite Ian Donaldson, ed., Ben Jonson (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985), although I emend “goods” to “good” in Epigram 80, cited
below. Unless otherwise noted, all other references are cited from C. H. Hereford and
Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1925–52), hereafter HS, but with spelling and punctuation modernized. Attempting to
explain Jonson’s conversion, David Riggs offers a cartoon version of Catholic beliefs:
“the Catholic priest . . . had the power . . . to absolve him of his sins. Unlike his
Protestant counterpart, the priest would not have required Jonson to feel remorse over
his crimes as such or to believe that God had pardoned him” (Ben Jonson: A Life
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], p. 52). Catholics hold that the priest
dispensing sacraments always acts as God’s agent, never as a substitute; and Catholic
doctrine has always required contrition for sin. See, to begin with, “Priesthood” and
“The Sacrament of Penance” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v.; The Council of Trent,
Session 14; James P. Crowley, “’He took his religion by trust’: The Matter of Ben
Jonson’s Conversion,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme ns 22.1
(1998): 53–70.
2. See Theodore A. Stroud, “Ben Jonson and Father Thomas Wright,” ELH 14 (1947):
274–82, and “Father Thomas Wright: A Test Case for Toleration,” Recusant History
1 (1951): 189–219, with an addition by B. Fitzgibbon, SJ, and a bibliography by D. M.
Rogers (pp. 261–80); William Webster Newbold, “General Introduction,” in The
Passions of the Mind in General, by Thomas Wright (New York: Garland, 1986), esp.
61–62; and Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, English and Welsh Jesuits 1555–1650, Catholic
Record Society Publications, 2 vols. (London: Catholic Record Society, 1994–95), 2
(no. 75): 340.
3. Philip J. Ayres, ed., Sejanus His Fall, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1990), p. 22. The quotation below is cited from this edition.
4. Lord Burlegh’s official defense of civil procedures against Catholics, occasioned by
widespread outrage over the torture and execution of Edmund Campion, appeared in
1583 as The Execution of Justice in England, for maintenance of public and Christian
peace, against certain stirrers of sedition and adherents to the traitors and enemies of
the realm, without any persecution of them for questions of religion, as is falsely
reported and published by the fautors and fosterers of their treasons. Translated into
Latin, French, Dutch, and Italian, the book drew a reply from William Allen and
touched off a heated controversy. See Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the
Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1977), pp. 68 ff. Discomfort with the religious policies did not preclude Jonson’s
admiration for the man (Underwood, 30) and for his son and successor, Robert
(Epigrams, 43, 63).
5. Frances Teague argues that the priest was Thomas Wright and that Jonson carried out
his commission later (“Jonson and the Gunpowder Plot,” Ben Jonson Journal 5 [1998]:
249–52).
6. See HS 1: 65–67; Rocco Coronato, “Was it just an anecdote?: Ben Jonson and the
Eucharist, Paris, 1612,” Ben Jonson Journal 4 (1997): 35–46.
7. Barbara N. De Luna reads Catiline as a post-Gunpowder plot assertion of loyalty, but
argues implausibly that Jonson’s Catholicism was short-lived and that he merely
pretended to persist in that faith (Catiline, Jonson’s Romish Plot: A Study of “Catiline”
114 / Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme
and its Historical Context [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967]); Alizon Brunning contends that Volpone allows Jonson to satirize aspects of Catholicism but to resist
rejecting his Catholic faith (“Jonson’s Romish Foxe: Anti-Catholic Discourse in
Volpone,” Early Modern Literary Studies 6 [2000]: 1–32); Julie Maxwell demonstrates
that The Magnetic Lady (1632) and The Tale of a Tub (1633) use anti-Catholic rhetoric
and stereotypes to satirize some aspects of Laudianism (“Ben Jonson among the Vicars:
Cliché, Ecclesiastical Politics, and the Invention of ‘Parish Comedy,’” Ben Jonson
Journal 9 [2002]: 37–68).
8. T. Wilson Hayes, “Ben Jonson’s Libertine Catholicism,” in Praise Disjoined: Changing Patterns of Salvation in 17th-Century English Literature (New York: Peter Lang,
1991), pp. 119–36; A. W. Johnson, Ben Jonson: Poetry and Architecture (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 89–94; James P. Crowley, “The ‘Honest Style’ of Ben
Jonson’s Epigrams and The Forest,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et
Réforme ns 20.2 (1996): 33–56; Ian Donaldson, “Jonson’s Duplicity: The Catholic
Years,” in Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997), pp. 47–65; Richard Harp, “The Catholic Ben Jonson,” a paper contributed to a
seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America conference, San Francisco, 1999.
9. Thomas C. K. Rist discusses the pro-Anglicanism and royal compliment of The Irish
Masque, but unpersuasively elides both with anti-Catholicism (“Religious Politics in
Ben Jonson’s The Irish Masque,” Cahiers élisabéthains 55 [1999]: 27–34). For a more
judicious account of Jonson’s religion, art, and politics, see David Norbrook, Poetry
and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984),
pp. 175–94. Norbrook discusses Jonson’s conversion to Catholicism in the context of
his aversion to Puritan apocalyptic enthusiasm and the doctrine of predestination, and
his reconversion in the context of the rise of an anti-Calvinistic Arminianism. Also
helpful is Joseph John Kelly, “Ben Jonson’s Politics,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme ns 7.3 (1983): 192–215.
10. Anthony Milton, for example, notes the ambivalences of the binary, two-confessional
model in the early seventeenth century (“A Qualified Intolerance: the Limits and
Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-Catholicism,” in Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism
in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Arthur F. Marotti [Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire: Macmillan, 1999], pp. 85–115).
11. Hugh Holland, Pancharis (London: Valentine Simmes for Clement Knight, 1603).
12. Thomas Wright. The Passions of the Mind. (London: Valentine Simmes and Adam
Islip for Walter Burre and Thomas Thorpe, 1604).
13. Thomas Wright, A Treatise Showing the Possibility and Conveniency of the Real
Presence of our Saviour in the Blessed Sacrament (“Antwerp” [i.e., London], 1596).
14. On More’s influence see Robert C. Evans, Habits of Mind: Evidence and Effects of
Ben Jonson’s Reading (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995), pp. 191–99.
15. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1500
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
16. Peter Lake discusses the veracity of Jonson’s Puritan caricatures in Bartholomew Fair
and The Alchemist in The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in
Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), pp.
579–610.
Robert S. Miola / Ben Jonson, Catholic Poet / 115
17. David McPherson, “Ben Jonson’s Library and Marginalia: An Annotated Catalogue,”
Studies in Philology 71 (1974): nos. 25, 28, 178, 46, 184, 18, 162. Prof. Woudhusyen
graciously supplied the additional titles in a private communication.
18. I cite the text and translation from The Primer, or Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
trans. Richard Verstegan (Antwerp, 1599), sigs. D3v–D4.
19. Juniper B. Carol, ed., Mariology, 3 vols. (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing Co.,
1955–61), 3: 425; Hollybush’s refutation of the Salve, Regina appears at the end of
Martin Luther, An Exposition of the Song of the Blessed Virgin Mary called Magnificat,
trans. John Hollybush (Southwark, 1538), sigs. kiii–kv.
20. For an informative analysis of the poem see Paul M. Cubeta, “Ben Jonson’s Religious
Lyrics,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 62 (1963): 96–110, esp. 98–101;
Cubeta also discerns the influence of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and Saint Ignatius in
Jonson’s religious poetry. Though the evidence is not conclusive, the initials “B.I.”
and other signs signal Jonson’s authorship of the Garland poem (HS 11: 159–60);
dissenting, Graham Bradshaw claims that the “negligent attribution” of such “bad
poems” reveals “an alarmingly uncertain grasp of Jonsonian values,” i.e., the values
of “Christian Humanism” (“Three Poems Ben Jonson Did Not Write: A Note on
Jonson’s Christian Humanism,” ELH 47 (1980): 484–99, esp. 494). Subjective judgment (“bad”) masquerades as textual argument, enabling the critic to dismiss poems
he dislikes and critics he disagrees with; Jonsonian “values,” apparently, do not include
the Marian devotions evident elsewhere in Jonson’s work, and “Christian Humanism”
here excludes anything Catholic.
21. Bernard H. Newdigate, ed., The Poems of Ben Jonson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936),
pp. 367–68. I quote the Litany and translation from John Sweetnam, The Paradise of
Delights (Saint-Omer: English College Press, 1620), sigs. O5v–O8v.
22. Mark Eccles, “Jonson and the Spies,” Review of English Studies 13 (1937): 385–97;
see also Robert Cummings, “Liberty and History in Jonson’s Invitation to Supper,”
Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 40 (2000): 103–22. Cummings notes that
Poley regularly met with the Babington plot conspirators for dinner, then reported on
them: “every day, after these malign suppers, they were betrayed” (p. 113).
23. See John Hungerford Pollen, SJ, ed., Unpublished Documents Relating to the English
Martyrs, Vol. 1: 1584–1603, Catholic Record Society Publications, 5 (London: J.
Whitehead & Son, 1908), pp. 47–50.
24. On the possible implications of Jonson’s stay in the Aubigny household, see Donaldson, “Jonson’s Duplicity.”